Abstract. With the development of science and technology, human-computer interaction is not only an indispensable technology of research projects such as robot control and IOT, but also has gradually penetrated into the daily life of most people. Because of the inconvenience and dependence on the hard devices of traditional human-computer mode, the finding of more natural human-computer interactive ways is particularly urgent. Hand gesture is vivid, intuitive and contains a lot of interactive information, with same expression ability as natural languages such as spoken language and written language, it can act as a means of natural communication between human and machine. This paper offered an overview of hand gesture recognition including its definition and classification, the general framework of vision based hand gesture recognition was then analyzed in detail.